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I’ve just visite
d a very odd website. It belongs to someone I met at a recent networking event and I wanted his email address to make contact as I can’t find his business card.
When I couldn’t see any details on the home page, naturally I went straight to the ‘Contact’ page – to be confronted by a form. And that’s all that was on the page – no phone number, no address, no email – nothing but a form to complete – which I don’t want to do. I know forms have their place, but surely not as the only way of getting in touch?
I wonder how often this chap’s phone rings with new enquiries?
It got me thinking about how we often don’t see the obvious on our own websites (I even had a quick look at ours to make sure you can contact us easily!)
Find out if you’re a mystery to your clients by taking a critical look at your website. Better still, ask someone who hasn’t seen it before to visit it and ask them to answer a few questions:
- How do they get in touch with you?
- Can they explain what you do?
- Do you make it clear who you do it for?
- Is it obvious what you want them to do next?
Visitors to your website should be able to easily see all this information on your home page (even if it’s just a summary and they need to click through to other pages to read more detail). After all, the home page is often the one most first-time visitors land on, so it’s important to let them know if they’re in the right place quickly.
Make it very easy for your customers and prospective customers to find basic information. If you don’t, they’ll click away because they don’t have time to solve a mystery.
Have you come across websites that kept you guessing? Do share in the comments below. And if you found this post helpful, please retweet it!
I guess he’s trying to avoid spambots harvesting his email address which I do as well on my website. I think it’s important to have your phone number on the page though. If possible on every page.
Hi Tola – thanks for commenting here.
I agree with you about the importance of displaying your phone number on every page of your website. And for those people who aren’t quite ready to pick up the phone, sending an email is often an ‘easier’ option. To avoid having your email address harvested or ‘scraped’, you can encrypt it using a bit of code. Failing that, using (at) instead of @ or even inserting a couple of spaces in the email address will render them useless to spambots. Thanks again for commenting – love your website btw!